A Maine camp with real connections to famed secret agent James Bond has just hit the market – for a cool $4.2 million.
If you really like it, just show up with cash. In a briefcase. Small bills with untraceable watermarks only. No fast moves. Hands outside pockets.
Bond. James Bond.
The name is simple, elegant, and perfectly fitting for the British secret agent that author Ian Fleming would bring to life in his novels. Fleming once said: “007 is a blunt instrument and I wanted a blunt name.”
Actually, before the debonair, swashbuckling Sean Connery made the role famous there was really a (Maine) guy named James Bond.
The well-known ornithologist once owned and lived in the cottage on Mount Desert Island that’s on the market.
Ornithology is a fine pursuit but the fact that 007 derived his name from a Maine birder is oh-so special.
The cottage listing actually calls it Bond Camp, named for former owner James Bond, the noted author of a book called “Native Birds of Mount Desert Island,” and of course inspiration for the name of the world’s most famous fictional spy.
“Located on the ‘quiet side’ of Mount Desert, Bond Camp occupies a large, very private wooded parcel of 15.7 acres with 785 feet of shorefront on pretty Marsh Harbor,” according to the listing. “Woodland paths course through the sylvan woods, with granite outcroppings, a fenced garden, fragrant blooms and lush mossy areas amongst the natural pine needle paths.
“There are four separate cabins with a total of five bedrooms and three- and one-half baths. This property straddles the town lines of Mount Desert and Tremont, so it is centrally located to the various villages on the island.”
While writing the now-famous 007 series at his Goldeneye villa in Jamaica, Fleming was reading “Birds of the West Indies” by James Bond, the renowned 20th-century American ornithologist whose former Maine cottage is now available.
“Fleming poached the author’s name, thinking it would be perfect for a spy,” reports Forbes.com. “Fleming and the real James Bond had much in common: both were educated in England and had a particular love for the Caribbean, including Jamaica.”
The real Bond split his time between the Caribbean, Philadelphia, and Maine where he researched birds and wrote books.
Author Jim Wright’s book, “The Real James Bond,” says Bond and Fleming met unexpectedly in Jamaica.
During their meeting Fleming revealed to the real Bond that he wove subtle clues about his identity into his text, often referencing the field of ornithology and the fictional spy’s passion for birds.
The real Bond, who died in 1989, was the nephew of Carroll Sargent Tyson, an American painter and art collector most famous for his bird lithographs.
From the time Bond was born until he died, he spent every summer on Mount Desert, the state’s largest island.
Don’t forget. Cash only. Or piranha pond…
The piranha pond belonged to Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
In the 1967 film “You Only Live Twice,” Blofeld used a piranha-filled pool with a trapdoor bridge as a method of execution for those who failed him or displeased him.
Blofeld, as the head of SPECTRE, had his hidden headquarters inside a volcano, and guests and agents alike had to cross a bridge over this dangerous piranha pool to access his inner sanctum.
Blofeld even dropped one of his own henchwomen, Helga Brandt, into the piranha-infested water after she failed to eliminate Bond.
$4.2 Million or we’re both dead.
